Posts Tagged ‘IPv6’

Doing a lot of government contract work, the question of whether WebCenter Interaction supports IPv6 or not comes up quite a bit. In the coming weeks I’ll write more on this topic, but I thought I’d just get this party started with a bit of a fact check in simple bullet form. It turns out that the question isn’t really whether WebCenter Interaction supports it, but whether your NETWORK supports it. Here are some facts to get us started, and stay tuned to our IPv6 updates for more information on the topic in the coming weeks.

IPv4 – the nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn addressing scheme we’ve all come to know and love is running out of space – there are only so many combinations of numbers, and we’re pretty much out of them.

IPv6 is the new version of the addressing scheme that contains a virtually unlimited supply of addresses.

Even if we were able to convert all sites to supporting IPv6, the vast majority of clients still won’t work with this new addressing scheme. Browser compatibility and operating system support are very strong – you most likely have a supported browser and OS. The problem is that the NETWORK just isn’t there: most likely your ISP doesn’t support it yet, and it’s possible that your network hosting provider doesn’t either!

In other words, as a systems administrator the job is mostly out of your hands – you need the network guys to catch up on this one. That means DNS entries, hardware upgrades, and routing changes – all of which take time. The coming posts will mostly focus on the SYSTEMS side of the equation – how do you make your portal work with IPv6? – and you’ll be surprised how easy your job is compared to the NETWORK side.